Career Bankers Alone Can’t Solve the Financial Industry’s Problems

The banking industry is mired in a state of permanent crisis. Some firms, like Deutsche Bank, are still trying to clamber out of holes they dug before the financial meltdown, negotiating multibillion-dollar settlements with the Department of Justice. Others, like Wells Fargo, have dug completely new holes for themselves, engaging in forms of Main Street misconduct that would have embarrassed the high-rolling investment bankers on Wall Street.

The consequences in terms of public confidence are profound. A recent survey conducted by my firm, Brunswick Group, revealed that 82% of people in the U.S. and three other leading countries favor additional bank regulation; 59% support breaking up the banks; and 56% favor smaller, more-personal banks. Most think banks are part of an elite establishment that’s lost sight of the broader mission to serve customers and would prefer they operate more like nonprofits.

A lot has changed in the banking industry since the crisis in 2008, especially in terms of regulation and compliance. Much less has changed in terms of people, especially in the balance of broad experience and specialist depth. Most of the leading financial institutions are still led by career bankers — in some cases the same people who led these institutions through the crisis. Wells Fargo, for instance, has just replaced a 32-year veteran of the bank with a 29-year veteran.

In this respect, the banking industry illustrates a broader trend in our society: the model of light managerial supervision for increasingly powerful career specialists. In our globalizing, technology-driven, ever-more-complex world, we have become convinced that the route to personal and institutional success lies in narrower and deeper specialization. We have entered the world of ultra specialists.

The permanent crisis in banking is an outgrowth of this, a man-made disaster created by individuals who have gotten completely carried away by the perceived value of specialist expertise. The damage from this myopic approach is not just reputational but also economic, given the critical role the financial system plays in enabling growth, investment, job creation, and wealth.

This crisis reveals the three most toxic perils of depth.

First, hubris. Even now, the highly skilled — and highly paid — specialists who power the leading financial institutions are supremely confident in their own abilities, speak a technical language few of us can understand, and apply their expertise to develop sophisticated, complex, and opaque financial products. In an arena that Alan Blinder describes as “opacity and complexity run amok,” the gap between what they and the rest of us, including regulators, understand remains dangerously wide.

Second, blinkered vision. A defining characteristic of specialists is that they know only what they see and see only what they know — a self-reinforcing loop. They lack the wider perspective to understand the interlocking aspects of the financial system; the breadth of intellectual discipline to assess the economics, mathematics, sociology, and psychology of financial behavior; and the insight to understand past experience with, say, overinflated asset bubbles.

Third, lack of foresight. The distinguishing feature of the financial crisis and much that has happened since is that we all assumed the specialists were right, up to the point when it became evident they were wrong. That’s especially true of their predictions about the future. As professor Philip Tetlock and other researchers have shown, specialist experts are very poor predictors. Tetlock’s landmark study of geopolitical outcomes — 80,000 predictions made by 284 professional forecasters over three decades — showed nonexperts actually made the most-accurate predictions.

It no longer makes sense for banks to be run and operated exclusively by career bankers. The cornerstone of bank recruiting strategies should be experiential diversity enabled by a broad range of personal experiences and networks. People with this kind of diversity exhibit the “wisdom of crowds”; they are programmed to be collectively smart. They are inherently less constrained by a single type of experience precisely because their worldview is so much broader.

Research and experience suggests those with more experience exhibit four particular traits, chief among them a strong moral compass. People who build a broader life and career routinely have to deal with areas of moral complexity what’s right and wrong is not always certain. To navigate that complexity, they develop an inner sense that distinguishes good choices from bad — an implicit ethical code and guide for morally appropriate behavior, which has often gone missing in banking and other industries.

They also develop transferable skills. Working in different arenas is the professional equivalent of cross-training, resulting in greater flexibility and adaptability and a common foundation of universal skills that can transfer readily from one situation to another.

Broad experience also enables contextual intelligence, a capacity to understand and adapt to different contexts and to operate effectively in a variety of situations. While some people seem hardwired to succeed in one context and fail in another, others are more elastic and able to adjust for different situations.

Finally, as Louis Pasteur famously noted, “In the field of observation, chance favors the prepared mind.” People with a prepared mind in the form of broader experience are able to anticipate, interpret, and navigate aspects over which they have some control or influence. Since experience has shown there is no surefire way to predict what chance will deliver, they prefer to create options, rather than become dependent on a single throw of the dice.

As individuals and as a society, we cannot afford to be as prone to the perils of depth as we have been, especially in our financial institutions. The populist climate in our politics, combined with the lack of public trust in financial institutions, will only grow unless banks adopt a different approach. A good place to start is by investing in broad experience and rebalancing the ranks on Wall Street with far-reaching and wide-ranging professional attainment that can help us value preeminence over depth.